CHINA Bishop died Gao, the ‘underground’ bishop of Kaifeng

According to local sources, he passed away at the age of 77 in Shaanxi. In 2005, he was secretly ordained as coadjutor to Bishop Liang Xisheng, who died two years later, but was never recognized by the Chinese authorities. It should be remembered that the “official” headquarters of this Church in Henan has been vacant since the death of the illegitimate bishop in 2001. It is an archdiocese with a long history: PIME missionaries worked there before suffering persecution from the communist regime.

Milan () – Sources linked to the Catholic communities of mainland China today released the news of the death of Msgr. Joseph Gao Hongxiao, a Franciscan friar minor and “underground” bishop of the Archdiocese of Kaifeng, in Henan province. Monsignor Gao, 77, died last night at his home in Meixian, a town in Shaanxi province, where he was originally from.

Monsignor Gao Hongxiao was ordained coadjutor bishop with the mandate of the Holy See on January 1, 2005 by his predecessor, Monsignor John Baptist Liang Xisheng, who later died at the age of 84 on September 27, 2007. According to canon law , mons. Gao must have succeeded him as legitimate bishop. However, since he was not recognized by the Chinese authorities, he had great difficulties carrying out his ministry in a context such as Kaifeng, where the separation between “official” and “underground” communities persists.

As of 2007, Monsignor Gao was the only bishop of Kaifeng, since for the ecclesiastical bodies controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the see (very important for the history of Catholicism in Henan) had been vacant since the death (in 2001) of Monsignor Stanislaus Han Daoyi, a priest appointed by the Patriotic Association and ordained a bishop in 1993, without papal authorization.

This problematic situation reflects the sufferings that the Catholic community of Kaifeng has gone through throughout its history. Since the time of Matteo Ricci, this area has been known because the descendants of the “worshippers of the cross” lived there, probably heir communities of the Nestorian missionaries of the first millennium. Starting in the 17th century, it was the Jesuits and the Lazarists who exercised their ministry in Kaifeng, until Propaganda Fide it was entrusted to PIME in the second half of the 19th century. The first two bishops, Monsignor Noah Giuseppe Tacconi and Monsignor Gaetano Pollio, also belonged to the Italian missionary institute; the latter was imprisoned in 1951 and then forced into exile under Mao’s China. The first “official” bishop of Kaifeng, Monsignor Stephen He Chunming, also illegitimately ordained in 1962, had been Monsignor Pollio’s vicar before being forced to join Party organs.

Fr. Franco Mella is a PIME missionary and currently lives in Hong Kong. In recent years he spent some periods in Kaifeng, and in dialogue with , recalls: “I met Msgr. Gao a few times in Kaifeng. He was a very warm person. It was the young priests who brought me to him. He told me that he had tried many times to get in touch with those in charge of the official Church, but that the situation had not been resolved. In the last term, he was very ill.”

An estimated 30,000 faithful live in the diocese of Kaifeng. There are currently six vacant episcopal sees throughout Henan: Kaifeng, Zhengzhou, Shangqiu, Luoyang, Zhumadian and Xinxiang. The question of the dioceses that remain without a bishop is one of the critical points of the Provisional Agreement between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China, renovated last October. Till the date, more than a third of Chinese dioceses lack a bishopand the last episcopal ordination took place on September 8, 2021 in Wuhan.